BPEL for Web Services: Rounding off the Essentials

BPEL (BPEL4WS) is the Business Process Execution Language for web services, a popular web service composition language and possibly the future standard. In this article, we present the capabilities of BPEL and its associations with other technologies and formalisms. We further discuss some of the existing BPEL engines, their extensions to BPEL and motivation behind these extensions.